Sermon

Oh my. Far too long silent. And, I can't really promise I will be doing any better in the near future. Classes and church work have been....time consuming, to say the least. I sincerely hope to start writing again in the near future.

At the very least, I can point you to some new content over on BDWHITE.com. Yeah, remember that site...where I used to write stuff? Well, since I'm still preaching fairly regularly, I thought the least I could do would be to post my latest sermon up there, especially since I managed to get it recorded. So, here's the link:

B.D. White Sermons

The specific sermon you're looking for is "The Church Is...". Clicking on the sermon title (or this link) will take you to a very rough (read--copy and pasted) html version, but there is a nice PDF version listed below the description, as well as the audio recording in both ogg and mp3 formats. Let me know what you think!

Oh, by the way--Claire, if you read this and then go listen to the sermon audio...please forgive my horrible, horrible Scottish accent. Or, at least, don't make fun of me...too much. ;-)

Finally got around to posting my Sunday sermon online over at BDWHITE.com. It's over in the "Sermons" section, per usual.

My deliver of the sermon on Sunday was lacking, and the sermon itself is fairly short for the topic (there was quite a bit more that I would have like to have put in). But, I think the text is fairly solid.

I know I'm really behind on writing and blogging and photos right now. School and Church have taken top priority, but I hope to find some room in my schedule for these other activities as well, especially since I enjoy them! Until then, though, hopefully my brief pops in and out will suffice.

Well, my final sermon out at Boise City is up in the "Sermons" section of BDWHITE.com. I have it posted in just about every format possible (plain HTML, PDF, ogg vorbis, mp3, streaming mp3). If you do happen to try the streaming mp3, let me know if it works, especially if you're using IE. It seems to work fine on Firefox for me, but this one sermon doesn't seem to want to stream in IE, and I can't figure out why. Hopefully it just happens to be my particular IE test case.

I'm really hoping that all the major browsers will get their acts together and start supporting the <audio> and <video> tags from HTML5. Mozilla has already said they are going to be supporting ogg vorbis audio and ogg theora video via the tags in the upcoming Firefox 3.1. (And I think the new Opera is supposed to support the tags as well.) This will make embedding audio and video much, much easier. In fact, the tags work basically the same as the image tag for putting a picture on your page.

The only problem is that the HTML committee didn't specify which codecs that tag should support. This is a big bummer, because it could fragment the tags into something unusable, and be basically the same as before flash video became the defacto standard because of youtube. I mean, what use is an embedded video tag, if the video is a wmv file and you're running Linux or OSX? Same problem as all the streaming video news sites from 3 or 4 years ago. The whole reason flash video works for everyone is because it requires a specified codec. And it's really a shame, too, because ogg vorbis and theora really would have fit the bill for this perfectly. Theora is not the best video codec around, but it is at least as good as mpeg4, and when Dirac comes around, it will be able to compete with things like H264 (which the new flash video is based on). And ogg vorbis as been consistently shown to best mp3, and the auto-normalization you can do with it is just awesome.

Anywho...check out the sermon...and maybe in a year or two I'll switch over to the fancy audio tags. :-)

Thanks for all the kind words from everyone regarding the sermon. It went pretty well yesterday. Everyone was very kind and said many complimentary things about it. The best surprise was that my friend, Becky, came to hear me speak, even though she had just driven across the country and had gotten into town very late the night before. Thank you, Becky! :-)

I've posted the sermon. You can check it out in the BDWHITE.com sermons section.

For Trinity Sunday, here's a Trinity Sermon, over at my {art of language} website in the Sermons section.